Quotes from Djuna Barnes

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.

Destiny and history are untidy.

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.

Life, the permission to know death.

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.

Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?

Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.

the people... they are church-broken, nation-broken -- they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.